The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has confirmed that new laws will maintain curbs on political freedoms. Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

It is a truism of the "Arab spring" and other periods of sudden change in repressive political systems that the most dangerous moments are those when the regime starts meeting its critics' demands.

And the Syrian government's abrogation of its notorious emergency law represents Bashar al-Assad's biggest concession yet to the protest movement.

The step is all the more potent coming a day after trouble spread to Homs, Syria's third largest city, with thousands taking part in demonstrations that were violently crushed by the security forces.

It is true, as opposition activists have warned and Assad has confirmed, that new laws will maintain curbs on political freedoms. But the symbolic value of the change is still enormous. The planned abolition of the state security court is another big step forward.

Measures like this may buy time. Pro-regime Syrians – prickly about foreign pressure and nervous about change – are hoping Assad will ride out the protests, still not on the scale seen in Tunisia and Egypt. But it may all be too late.

Assad's capacity for change is not unlimited. State accountability is an alien concept – with no sign of an end to the law that gives the Mukhabarat secret police immunity from prosecution. Membership of the banned Muslim Brotherhood remains a capital offence.

Still, expectations that Syria's security dominated Ba'ath regime is about to fall look very wide of the mark. Assad might have done better to respond to the protests by scrapping the emergency law straight away. But his speech at the end of March was defiant, blaming foreign "conspiracies" for the popular rage that began in the southern city of Deraa.

Appointing an unimpressive new government has proved no more effective – especially when the president is seen to dictate what his ministers should do.

"Nobody believes in these tricks any more," said Nadim Shehadi, a Middle East analyst at the Chatham House thinktank in London. "The game is up. It's a bit like divorce: once you see beyond marriage, then it all collapses."

Hafez al-Assad, others say, could get away with hanging tough. Bashar cannot, argues Mohamad Bazzi of the Council on Foreign Relations, "as he confronts a different and unprecedented type of pressure rooted in deep popular grievances".

Signs are that the regime is concerned by the widening spread and intensity of the protests but confused as it makes alternating promises of change followed by brutality by the security forces.

It was alarming to hear the claim by the government that it is facing an "armed insurrection" in Homs and Baniyas.

But the charge that the rebels are Salafists – fundamentalist Sunnis often equated with al-Qaida – who are bent on fomenting sectarian strife is even more worrying.

The regime can still get out the crowds to chant pro-Assad slogans. But it is not a sign of confidence that the catchiest of them – "Allah, Syria, Bashar, that's all!" – is borrowed from Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi is hardly an inspiring model.

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